Shipping

Getting stuff from point A to point B should be straightforward. For companies that need international cargo shipping, however, the process often turns into a labyrinthine tangle of phone calls, faxes, and emails to third-party service providers with different pricing models and ways of sharing data. A new startup called Haven wants to simplify things. Read More

On-demand shipping startup Shyp is partnering with Banana Republic to help last-minute shoppers get presents to family and friends without needing to attach one of those awkward semi-apology notes to the package. Read More

Amazon is bringing its same-day delivery service to Toronto and Vancouver, giving Canadians a taste of a service that has been available to their counterparts south of the border for a while now. The same-day service requires that you have a postal code (that’s Canadian for zip code friends!) that matches its eligibility requirement, and that you order before 12 PM.
Same-day delivery… Read More

ShipHawk wants to take the pain out of shipping those items, with a platform that allows users to get shipping quotes from multiple providers and pick the one that makes the most sense for them. The company just closed on $5 million in new funding to expand its business and get its shipping engine integrated with a wider range of e-commerce platforms. Read More

Unless you are a philatelist or have a strong tolerance for boredom, standing in post office lines is a pain. This is especially true if you have to do it over and over and over again for your job. ShipBob, a startup backed by Y Combinator, wants to help small business owners and online sellers with a service that not only takes items to the post office, but also handles packaging and tracking. Read More

If you’re rooting for the drone team, then chalk up another win: Rolls-Royce is working on unmanned cargo ships that would roam the Earth’s oceans packed with crates of goods, controlled by captains safe on shore using virtual reality facilities to pilot their fleets. In other words, tomorrow’s salty tales of ghost ships with no one left on board could be all too verifiable… Read More

This summer, the Y Combinator-backed startup Lob launched a new developer API which lets companies easily integrate printing and shipping services into their applications. Today, the company is announcing $2.4 million in seed funding from various YC partners and angel investors. Participating in the round were Kevin Hale, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, Joshua Schachter, Alexis Ohanian… Read More

Last year, Google acquired Waterloo-based startup BufferBox, which provides shipping locker service to make it easy to get things delivered reliably even when you’re not sure where you’ll be when they’re arriving. The startup built its service on the idea that people never want to see another missed delivery door tag ever again, and began rolling out availability in Toronto… Read More

Want to build your own Postagram? You could with Lob, a new developer API for integrating printing and shipping services into applications that’s officially opening its doors today. The company makes it possible for a business to implement a programmatic means of printing, packaging, and shipping items on demand, including things like business cards, photos, posters, letters… Read More

With more commerce moving online every day, the shipping industry is in need of innovation. And one of the bigger pain points developers face when trying to integrate postage and shipping into their applications involves the antiquated technology major carriers like FedEx, UPS and USPS provide – complex SOAP or XML APIs that most developers would say are a nightmare to work… Read More

Postmaster, an Austin-based startup that aims to simplify shipping and parcel tracking through an easy to use REST API, launched earlier this year and today, the company announced that it has raised a seed investment round of $600,000 led by Capital Factory, Cloud Power and Zelkova Ventures, as well as a consortium of angel investors. The Postmaster team plans to use this additional… Read More

Who knew that package delivery would become a hot space, especially when it involves installation of physical lockers? Last week, we uncovered that Google’s recent acquisition, Bufferbox, was planning to invade the San Francisco Bay Area with its shipping service. Of course, after being acquired, nobody knew what would become of Bufferbox, so another Y Combinator company, Swapbox, stepped… Read More

Bufferbox, the Y Combinator company based in Canada that aimed to fix all of the issues that we have with receiving packages, has started to tease out a San Francisco Bay Area launch. Google acquired the company for a rumored $17 million to $25 million back in November with little or no discussion about the future plans for the product.
It’s clear that this could be a huge part of… Read More

Shipping things to your house is so 2011, so companies like Amazon are setting up physical lockers for you to pick your online orders up from. Today, Walmart has announced that they’re testing a similar program in about twelve stores.
Basically, you can go online, order all of the things that you want, and your items will show up in this locker rather than your doorstep. This means that… Read More

Postmaster, a TechStars Cloud company based in Austin, Texas, just launched a new API in beta that will allow businesses to optimize their small parcel shipments.
You’d think that shipping is pretty much a solved problem at this point. In reality, it’s still hard for developers to easily hook their applications into the APIs of major shippers and understand who offers the most… Read More

You know the drill, you order something from your favorite site and you can’t wait to get the package. Like a blogger normal person, you go to work and hope that the package is there when you get home. That hope slowly turns into worry as you picture your valuable freight sitting outside of your home, while people walk by it and wonder what it is.
There are a few companies providing… Read More

Some buyers of Apple’s 4th generation iPad with LTE are receiving notices that their shipments will arrive by November 16, otherwise known as this coming Friday. The latest iPad had originally been announced with an anticipated shipping date of mid-November, which would mean Apple is making good on its promises with shipping coming soon. The iPad mini’s delivery date remains a… Read More

We last caught up with HD Trade Services in August, when the company, part of Y Combinator’s summer class, released a tablet app to help smaller enterprises manage the process of buying and shipping goods from one country to another, by offering visual inspections (by way of photos and HD video) of goods to minimize fraud.
Now HD Trade Services is taking that concept one step further… Read More